REDDING, CALIFORNIA (2009)—The history of peoples is also the history of families. At least, it starts that way. Therefore, at the risk of boring you, I offer some small family history of my own at the beginning of this re-exploration of America, with the hope that it will be helpful to explain the somewhat unusual perspective brought to the subject. At the end of my apology, I will again disappear, taking the first-person references with me, but the perspective will still be there in third person. It informs the whole story.
I grew up in what was sometimes called the U.S.A. My father was a missionary there in the bad old days before civil rights. As voluntary exiles from “the best country on earth” (Dad’s hypnotically repeated reminder), our family were conscious the whole time of being strangers in a strange land. Counting down the eternity until our scheduled return “home,” under the setup, was much like waiting for the Second Coming, only shorter. Home, luckily for us, was a semi-divine place known as “America,” and America was a sort of base station for the larger, enclosing journey to heaven and a destination that by all reports basked in heaven’s borrowed light. I figured it to be roughly equivalent to the Delectable Mountains of
The Pilgrim’s Progress, a guidebook to travels, terrestrial and celestial, that I early discovered in my dad’s library and immediately recognized as containing the overall roadmap of life.
I knew America, increasingly, from learned myth and legend—plus a few fiercely guarded but receding real memories, like something seen from the back window of a moving car or over the shoulder of Christian as he heads for yon wicket gate: Grandma’s north Texas farm and the large family gatherings there with fried chicken, cousins in overalls, jealous bickering and crawdads in the stock tank . . . snowdrifts outside the front door, somewhere in Montana . . . my warm bed in Eugene, Oregon, where I always expected to wake up again—like the pilgrim in the book—with sun still streaming in the window, knowing that everything since 1946 had been a long dream.
Adding symmetry to the dream were some clear basic similarities between America and this place of temporary sojourn. A seventh-grade teacher in East London—or was it Port Elizabeth?—made a point of framing them as a principle of history, but they were obvious on our arrival. The Union of South Africa, he said, was an America for the world’s southern half. The two societies were equivalent. Like the United States, the Union’s full name abbreviated to “U.S.A.”—and this one shared key features with the other, more famous U.S.A.
Both, he said, were modern industrial nations created by white people on overseas terrain, and both had a representative form of government on the European model and a culture built on Christian values and traditions. By religion, America’s “Pilgrims” and South Africa’s Voortrekkers both were Calvinist Protestants with a connection to Holland, and in both locations they had made a covenant with God near the start of their experience. In both places, pioneers had set out in ox wagons to find a promised land—the Great Trek corresponding to America’s Westward Expansion—and both peoples showed their mettle in facing a larger native population who fought them before being subdued and Christianized. Both groups, especially, then had the English in the role of bully, and both had fought two wars of independence against them—the Afrikaners (Boers), for better or worse, losing only the rematch. And so forth.
I took such similarities for granted, as part of the whole unified scheme of things. But to my father they were an irritation. Daddy was an evangelist proudly “from Fo’t Worth, Texas,” a big-framed man with abundant energy and impatient self-confidence built on a sense he—and we—were special, with a sacred history not to be diluted by comparison. Told by him, this inherited family history held strong overtones of the biblical Jacob and his 12 sons (including, as it did, Daddy’s namesake, Benjamin):
First, his German parents, separately, had had the foresight to come to America, the best nation on earth. Here they had then found “the Truth” (the Seventh-day Adventist Church) and, with other German Adventists, settled to farm near Valley View, in the state that was biggest and best. Among seven brothers and seven sisters, he had been the only male chosen by a patriarchal father to go to college, an investment he was now repaying with a seven-year mission term (like Joseph working off his seven-year debt to Laban), “unto the finishing of the work and the soon coming of the Lord”—which was any minute now. “Think of it!” he liked to say. “Of all the places we could have been born, we were born in America. And not just anywhere in America but in Texas. And we didn’t have to go searching for the Truth—we were born right into it!”
Sometimes, being born white was part of the divine advantage at play in our lives. But Dad was not a big racist, as racism ran in those days. Considering that the old home place still had “nigger shacks” bleaching beyond the barn, his references to “nigger-shooters” and “nigger-toes” were reminiscent and a little naughty. He was disgusted by the visceral hatred of some Afrikaners for the kaffirs—South Africa’s equivalent slur—and worried about the racial apartheid that was hardening into policy while we watched as outsiders. He thought the segregationists’ cause unwise, un-Christian and, ultimately, doomed—just the kind of thing to expect from a people so stubbornly stuck in their history.
America and South Africa somehow the same? The very idea was beneath contempt, but he ridiculed it anyway. America, he liked to say, wasn’t afraid to try new things—to make things work in new ways. (He sent me to school in jeans and loud chartreuse socks at Brakpan to show his contempt for the school’s navy-blue and gray uniform of flannel shorts and a tie.) Things in America were bigger, especially in Texas, and they had more substance because Americans thought big thoughts. My father’s evangelistic “efforts” were the first in South Africa to break out of the conference room into the city hall main auditoriums of stolid colonial cities like Boksburg and Pietermaritzburg; his big tent for other venues boasted three main poles, a clean sawdust floor, a sleek plywood façade that proclaimed “Bible Auditorium” in bold gothic letters—it had music (including the latest-model Hammond Solovox), big fragrant bunches of lilies and vivid slide transparencies of heaven and hell.
His successes confirmed his confidence. At its best, to him, South Africa could be only the imperfect fulfillment of a dream fully realized in America instead. An example: The Doll’s House was an American-style drive-in on Louis Botha Boulevard in Johannesburg that made a perfectly delectable cheeseburger, along with banana and pineapple malts thick with real fruit. But to Daddy—stopping there hungrily after an evening of evangelism—its blue walls and red roof were but a pale foreshadowing of the drive-ins to be found once back in America, where the food was brought to your car by girls on rollerskates. Besides, who says “doll’s house,” anyway? It was “doll house,” as any real American would know.
So we made do on the local substitutes for everything, acquiescing reluctantly but curiously: in place of root beer, ginger beer. Not Karo but Lyle’s Golden Syrup with the biblical label (“From the strong came forth sweetness”). Instead of Oregon pears, pawpaws—replacing real Texas beef jerky, biltong. Not Yellowstone and its bears and deer but Kruger Park and its lions and elephants and endless herds of antelope, zebra and wildebees. We adapted.
At school, the chartreuse socks eventually gave way to pull-up gray stockings with a garter. Our American English made room for the Dutchy South African accent, a range of term substitutions and the infectious local lingo, from
ag (as in “
Ag, come here and let me have a look at you”) to zed for zee. I learned to say
cawn’t instead of
can’t when useful,
bioscope instead of
movie theater. A bug became a
goggo (a guttural Khoi borrowing, unpronounceable in American English). Against the parents’ every effort to exempt us as Americans, my sister and I learned
‘n bietjie Afrikaans. The Americans in our company joined the British—still pushy—in ridiculing this Afrikaners’ language derived from 18th-century “kitchen Dutch,” though it is probably the closest relative of modern English, with many shared words, a settler tongue like U.S. English (which
die Brits ridiculed too) equally suffused in its place and its history. I kind of liked it.
Meantime, the memories conveyed portable bragging rights: I was born in Texas too, after all. My best credential was a dog-eared black-and-white photo of me, 5 years old, waving a cowboy hat from the back of a bucking pinto pony at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show in 1946. (The pedestal holding us up was just visible.) Carried from town to town, it bought instant respect socially and, for my self-image, authenticity as a Texan like my dad and Gene Autry, whose song about a horse, “Old Faithful,” gradually grew scratchy sharing turntable time with local tunes about
loskop Afrikaner girls named Bokkie and a donkie that, in the irreverent schoolboy version, was wont to “
staan op die brug en pis in die lug.”As we counted down the long years until return and I merged with my adopted environment, the strange went familiar and exile turned into adventure: 1947, Johannesburg and Pretoria: wide eyes and apprehension. . . . 1948-1949, Durban and Brakpan, gamely settling in. . . . 1950-1951, Jo’burg the second time: consciously now a lark at the halfway mark. . . . 1951-1952, wistfully beautiful Cape Town: only a couple years to go! . . . 1953, Port Elizabeth and East London: a constant patter of talk about “home”—a home, now, away from home, though I would not realize it until years after.
Then the seven years of servitude were up. We came back to the real thing—the original U.S.A.—and I could measure the memories and the tales against the reality. To summarize what I found: The memories were sound—I enjoy them still today. But the bed I woke up in was not the one I had left in Oregon, and—though I didn’t immediately realize this either—I was not that five-year-old on a stuffed pony, anymore. Relocating in the South of “America” just in time for the civil rights unrest of the 1950s, I did some more growing up in the U.S.A. I was crestfallen to find it not much at all like Daddy’s notices but greatly like the U.S.A. I had just left.
Southern segregationists such as George Wallace and Strom Thurmond could have stood in for kaffir-baiting National Party firebrands without missing a lick, and vice versa. They even looked like them. In both countries, the segregated park bench became an icon for the segregated attitude. As in Atlanta, Johannesberg benches carried signs, there impartially in both Afrikaans (“
Slegs vir blankes”) and English (“For Europeans only”), that must have been for more the benefit of the white baas than the blacks who would have had to learn either language to read them. What in this situation had changed except geography?
Not until several years after various Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms had been won—again—by black people in Atlanta, Little Rock and places up North did I discover something hollow in the civil-rights victory itself. Not only was this freedom campaigning necessarily more or less a constant of American life like the equal-rights effort by natives in South Africa, then just heating up. But the people being freed were not even America’s actual natives! They were imports just like the white people—like my own grandparents on both sides. (And Africans, at that.) Where, in this hall of mirrors, were the natives? Well, they were hard to find.
“Red Indians” I knew mainly from a big picture book bought, pre-Africa, in an Omaha store basement and taken along and pored over. But the miserable Seminoles hawking curios at roadside in the Florida Everglades looked nothing like the dignified feathered Plains “chiefs” who rubbed shoulders there with Kit Carson. For that matter, where were the buffalo that also had appeared in its pages along with the Sharps buffalo rifle and other great guns of the American frontier? Where were the animals? Even semi-civilized South Africa could boast teeming herds of antelope in confusing variety and maybe too many
wildebees (“wild cattle”).
In the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, my touring family seemed hugely impressed by a historical pageant put on by a remnant of the Cherokee nation that had been shoe-horned into a tiny mountaintop reservation there. But I spent two years at a boarding academy north of Chattanooga, in southern Tennessee, without being told that the Cherokee’s final capital had been located a dozen miles from its classrooms, the departure point for their Trail of Tears six miles in the opposite direction. That part of America was not about the Cherokee—it was about the Civil War. I apparently had given up the Anglo-Boer wars for this, with Rebel-sympathizing Rednecks taking the role of the resentful Afrikaners and Yankees standing in for the victorious British (ironically, dubbed
rooineks, “rednecks,” in Afrikaans).
Back in Jo’burg, we American kids had played Cowboys and Indians with fake headdresses and toy bows and arrows that arrived, with torn packages of Fritos, in Christmas packages from “home.” We used to speculate who would win, in a pitched battle between Red Indians riding ponies and the Zulu foot regiments of a Shaka or Dingaan. Verdict: The Zulu would take a few arrows but, if they ever caught the Red Indians unhorsed, would make quick work of them with knobkerries (clubs) and assegais (stabbing spears); we used to practice drawing assegais and Zulu cowhide shields. South African kids, though, did not play Trekkers and Zulus, doubtlessly—as I now realized—because the issue between them had not yet been decided and the Zulu (Sotho, Xhosa, Ndebele, etc.) posed a continuing threat. South Africa Customs, after all, was confiscating the most realistic-looking cap guns to arrive in our packages—the ones that looked like six-shooters—for fear they would fall into native hands and feed a rising native crime wave. Cowboys and Indians was playable because the “Indians” were credible, established losers.
Now in America, I was reunited with my other grandpa, who provided authenticity on my mother’s side by having taken part in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1892. The story there was his bravado in standing off would-be land-grabbers with a wagon singletree. That was a contest between “Sooners,” though. Not until after we had buried him would I read his remembrance of the family’s wanderings from Nebraska dugout-sodhouse to Kansas homestead, led by his father, and his adventure in the land rush, and so learn of its genesis in news that “the Cheyenne and Arappahoe settlement in Oklahoma would be opened up for white people.” What native groups his father may have displaced he does not say. The additional fact that both Arapaho and Cheyenne had been bumped several times already—that this particular pushing match started in the Great Lakes region—does not appear in family histories like Grandpa’s and must be looked for. But it did not appear in history books either.
I was intrigued by the apparent embargo on ready information about the white man’s relationship with native North America. Later, as a smalltime newspaper reporter, I began talking to American natives, exploring their ideas and traditions and digging for the history. It was a private curiosity; I didn’t write about it. Because South Africa’s racial history carried shock waves through indigenous societies far to the north, I dug into Mexico’s and South America’s history of settler-native encounters as well. And in the 1970s, history caught up with me. At the same time as South Africa’s natives were striking and rallying for “one man, one vote,” I found myself being hired as news editor of a small daily in northern California, on condition I took the white man’s side in a dispute there with Pit River Indians trying to reclaim traditional land by reoccupying a part of it where Pacific Gas and Electric had built some power stations. Only, it wasn’t called taking the white man’s side—it was called objective reporting of an illegal seizure of company property.
It was later still that—uneasy of conscience and no longer in the clutches of career-driven thinking—I realized that I had found my key to the locked-up history of settlers and natives in America: It was invisible history because it was still being made, as it always was, from day to day, in an obscurity thrown by my own American settler’s shadow.
Therein lies the basis of this book.
After a continued preaching career in America (with many a fond backward glance) Daddy duly died, well short of the Second Coming; Mom, confused and dismayed by that failure, followed him quickly. Both were alive, though, to see South Africa’s history diverge from America’s history in 1994 when—free at last and thanking the same God Almighty as led their liberated cousins in the U.S.—South Africa’s natives won back the country from outnumbered white people with hardly a shot fired.
The indigenous peoples of South Africa have since set about changing placenames from Afrikaner to African and rewriting the nation’s history from a
volk tale of Calvinist sojourners in a promised land to a tale of, well—natives and settlers. Yet they have also largely forgiven the white man his sins and, with an indulgent tsk, invited his participation in their “Rainbow Nation.” (Whereas Americans fret about the growing presence of Spanish-speakers in the land, today’s South Africa has fully 11 official languages, including English and Afrikaans.) As a result of this unparalleled case of mission-taught Christian charity—and unspoilt native goodwill—though whites still control the money, for a moment it was South Africa that captured the world’s moral imagination, no longer the U.S.A., American-style. Dad, in his last days, saw it coming and just shook his head.
Dad also thought there was nothing to be done for the Indians. “That’s all in the past,” he’d say. “What can we do now, you know.” At the same time, his awareness of South Africa’s similar beginnings obliged him to see a certain hypocrisy in U.S. posturing at the height of the apartheid repressions. He fully recognized what most Americans did not have to—that the U.S. was able to take a strong moral position for majority rule only because American settlers and their descendants had long since eliminated natives as a threat here by killing most of them and becoming the majority in their place. It was a difficult reality for so late in the day. He just snorted and shook his head. The Lord was coming—He’d sort it out.
The morality of ethnicity and nationhood have only grown more difficult for white people everywhere since Europeanizing darker-skinned peoples was “the white man’s burden” by majority vote in a world where only white males voted. Britain, stripped of its populous overseas colonies in much the same way as South Africa was stripped of minority rule, is struggling now to accommodate the minority populations of Africans and Indians (from India) that its colonial adventure invited. An easier fit, for Britain, have been the white Africans, fleeing their own losses, who have come “home” in numbers to a landscape that, for them no longer feels like home. Other participants in this white African diaspora have escaped to other European homelands—Holland, France, Portugal—or else to those shining white settler success stories: Australia, Canada and the U.S. They lick their collective wounds on the World Wide Web and order
boerewors (farmer sausage) and
rooibos (formerly kaffir) tea from . . . home? A majority of my own childhood chums from the old South Africa seem to have followed me to America. (A disturbing majority of the returned U.S. missionary kids I can find, in loneliness and confusion I think, have committed suicide.)
America—the good "old" U.S. of it—is struggling now too. Here the old-line white majority is predicted to lose its edge by about 2050 to a plurality of minorities—overwhelmingly, peoples who, like them, came here from elsewhere: Asia and Africa, the much larger Spanish-speaking portion of the New World. The more numerous are demanding inclusion in a national history that, until recently, has been confined to a mythology of English-speakers’ successes in a wild and savage land—the one involving “Pilgrims,” Pocahontas and the unfailing wisdom of “Founding Fathers.” Hispanic Americans want in, but their myth of making good in el Norte has failed to captivate many of the same Anglo Americans whose ancestors had that myth too. They also bring a baggage of sometimes challenging home mythologies and a concept of “America” that goes well beyond the borders of customary U.S. popular thinking.
Robustly thriving in the myth are America’s blacks. Their struggle for recognition has defined the nation’s spiritual growth since the U.S. Civil War—has redeemed the American democratic ideal. Taking the white founders’ plotline of exile and attainment, blacks have remade it as their own, so that in this so recently “
slegs vir blankes” nation as in South Africa, “Let my people go” has become a sacred trust of history to be continually celebrated and refreshed. And where the myth went, the nation’s story has had to follow. The fact Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, though always known, did not become relevant until black people here had been promoted from human livestock to African American voters.
So central have U.S. blacks become to America’s redemption and the pageant of democracy that these descendants of enslaved Africans—who, after all, were imported from elsewhere like the white settler
baas—hold a position that might more “appropriately” be occupied by America’s indigenous peoples. An uninformed onlooker might reasonably think that these reality-adjusters, as “people of color,” are in fact the natives of America. An onlooker informed by South Africa’s experience might be forgiven for wondering, instead, if blacks are not being installed here as native surrogates to spare white people the embarrassment of facing their national conscience on the real thing—the rough equivalent of overtures to South Africa’s mixed-race (“Colored”) and Asian populations by the dying apartheid regime.
Meantime, America’s more than 4 million real natives remain un-free—un-credited—un-comprehended—chained, as they have been since the beginning, to a white-settler mythology like the one now discredited in South Africa. Even apartheid South Africa granted its indigenous peoples the official designation of “Natives” (thereby ruining the term there). But as a term here, “Native Americans” has much of the same bureaucratic feel, and most of us—including the government, half the time—still prefer to repeat Columbus’ error by calling them “Indians.” They are able to vote as citizens of the settler nation that took their land, but as nations in their own right they have no more real autonomy than the ridiculed “Bantustans” of apartheid South Africa. Reduced, in standing, to a national “minority” alongside Indian Americans (Americans from India: 1.67 million) and others, natives hold less clout than the nation’s wives and daughters (140 million), also a minority despite being actually a majority outnumbered only by whiteness of race. Native tradition has been shredded or lost in a nearly 300-year transcontinental settler onslaught, but most of its known real heroes have no place in a settler story that, when it does not overlook natives entirely, makes them either antagonists or collaborators . . . rarely brothers . . . and then not for long.
As for the history itself, it is become virtually a religion in that contorted form. Historians are not being asked, nor have they been much asking, what a truly bipartisan—settler and native—history might contain. Efforts to adapt the narrative to native perspectives are branded “revisionist” and resisted with all the fervor of Afrikaners defending their own exclusionary past. With the record here now massively accessible over the Internet, a less ingrown intellectual establishment and new evidence and insights arriving steadily, the nation’s story of itself is open as never before to rewriting. Now maybe it is okay, then, to look beyond the settler campfire—as white South Africans were made to do—and see the American native standing in the shadows.
He holds information worth celebrating, and he has been there a long time. Therein lies the substance of this book.
My intention is not to give “the natives’ side,” a chronicle of loss so disagreeable it has yet to be presented in full geographic glory. This will not be, either, a recitation of the white man’s sins, another self-stifling subject that has been presented piecemeal or localized, when done at all. Dee Brown’s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) and Edmund Wilson’s
Apologies to the Iroquois (1960) are well-regarded efforts in those genres. Instead, this book takes the novel approach of asking simply what each side of the New World encounter expected from the transaction and what each actually got.
Expectations are not at all a new subject. Columbus’ need to find “Indians”—his announcements that he’d found them—are universally known. The Puritans’ hopes of finding an empty land where they could practice their own pinched brand of religion unmolested are fundamental U.S. curriculum. The follow-up dreams of immigrants like my Oklahoma grandpa are U.S. sacred history, celebrated in hymns and genealogy Websites and countless movies. Post-Columbus, though, they are usually expectations that do not need and therefore do not include natives—expectations, actually, in spite of the native presence. It’s for that reason that natives have been omitted from the American story when they were not battling or signing land-giveaway treaties with settlers. Not as well recognized, for the same reason, is the balancing reality that the natives whom these Indo-European strangers always encountered, each step of the way, nourished expectations of their own.
Against a mass of long-available evidence to the contrary, history books still tend to show the indigenous typically as stumped by the encounter like the newcomers—except for the colossal accident of Cortés’ welcome by the Aztecs and the episode that traditionally opens U.S. history, Squanto’s timely “Hello, Englishmen” to hungry Pilgrims. The reality is that native America—and therefore America itself—has always possessed (it may be America’s only genuine claim to a “manifest destiny”) something special that black Africa does not: a broad visionary connection with the European invaders through symbol, myth and local tradition. As if made to order for a grand transatlantic recognition scene, a real fusion of worlds, is the fact especially that, from Paraguay and Peru to Washington State and beyond, from east to west on both American continents, natives said they saw the white man coming—often, knew who he was on first arrival.
The incredulous whites, who themselves really had no idea who they were talking to, shrugged the information off or dismissed it as superstition, and white historians continue to do so today. With nothing better available to explain it, the record of these claims has been laughed off by scholars or, worse, hijacked by Christian apologists, first by Spanish missionaries eager to prove New Spain a part of their Old World gospel vision, more recently by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even more anxious to prove its own New World patrimony. The visions remain native intellectual property nonetheless, and their keepers have proven doggedly resistant to giving them over, especially as experience has overcast the result with disappointment to date.
The Hopi, for example, have entertained Spaniards and Anglo-Americans both—sacred as well as profane—at their mesa-top villages in northern Arizona, yet Hopi traditionalists are still awaiting the arrival of the real white man, the real
bahana—the one who will know who they are. And the Hopi have lots of indigenous company who, weary of impostors, are waiting for the same sort of clarifying epiphany. (The Christian Fundamentalists’ problem of distinguishing Christ from Antichrist comes comically to mind.)
What follows here takes the native claims—the visions, prophecies, dreams and symbols of peoples who were key players in the encounter scene—simply at face value. It then puts them in context with the expectations, myths and dreams of the arriving Europeans and summarizes the result. The template is Vision and Encounter. Vision, of course, is supposed to precede encounter, and often enough it does—or that’s the story. At the same time, or later, encounter gives rise to revision, and new visions emerge to be tested against the reality of further encounters. The categories, therefore, are fluid and the division into bits and pieces for purposes of a time narrative arbitrary, though necessary. The visions themselves, in any case, show a reluctance to be bound by time, coming back from era to era and projecting an always receding future.
The product of this approach is astonishing in the consistency and scope of what it reveals. Much of what turns up ahead will be unfamiliar to most Americans, and when it is added to the story, the familiar often will appear in a new light. Separate perspectives merge; they become understandable in each other’s terms, and a new one emerges. Though the perspective achieved by employing native eyes to see the settler (as well as vice versa) is not one that history has much employed from Columbus onward—because of that also—it is still there to discover, a door remaining to open for many of us. Arguably, the undiscovered New World—maybe the real America?—will be the one that lies beyond that door.
What such an America might be like, to the (large) extent it remains unrealized, goes beyond the scope of this book to explore. I don’t myself expect, like my first-generation American father, to see a Promised Land in the present lifetime. But like Christian near the end of his journey, I think I see light from up ahead. Also from behind. (Having delivered Christian to heaven’s doorstep, his creator was obliged to remember he had left Christiana and the kids behind in the City of Destruction and to dream again.) In late reply to Dad’s rhetorical question of what can be done at so late a date I would suggest, as a beginning, just: Look. What’s there is not specific to time, and I have visions of Dad in his hereafter, conscious (in defiance of his belief that the dead are “asleep”) and seeing his America and his Africa, finally, united in the same comprehensive cosmic context.
The America of place—the geography in this narrative—is all of it (though Canada will be a little slighted as usual), visited in approximately the order of the white man’s arrival and advance. As the author is an American, U.S. of, what starts in Europe and continues through the Caribbean to South America and Mexico spends a disproportionate amount of time in “the land of the free.” I apologize. My only justification, beyond familiarity, is the nation’s own belief, expressed in so many ways, that its America is
the America and maybe—even today—the hope of the world.
Readers looking for an arcane “code” in the circumstances recounted here—an America Code—will be repaid by noting the patterns of thought and behavior, particular to groups more than to individuals, that recur insistently in the American experience—some mirrored across culture and race lines. In things generally that coincide and those that miss. Especially, in the coincidence of recurring symbols that, for peoples on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean separately, have been enduring markers for whatever transcends the barriers of time and space. Watch what happens with the tree, simply as a tree and as an actor under all its assumed identities, from symbol for the life force to symbol for sacrifice and regeneration to map of the cosmos.
Look, in particular, at the sun: Against all advice, the sun giveth as well as taketh away vision, and in the case of America it is central and overhead. Observe the sun’s habit of travel, from east to west. The color red is significant, too, like the red coat on the little girl in the black-and-white world of
Schindler’s List.
As the story begins, a bunch of white people are voyaging westward to a world they know only from legend and myth. At the same time, natives of another world are looking east. . . .
